Advancing The Issue: Mourning A Stateswoman

The Conservative Diplomat, The First Woman Named To Her Post, Passed Away On Thursday.

Ex-u.n. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick Dies

December 09, 2006|By Johanna Neuman/Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — The former envoy gained entry into an exclusive club, paving the way for other women in politics.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a staunch Reagan-era anti-Communist who infused American foreign policy with firm conviction as the first woman to serve as U.N. ambassador, has died. She was 80.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick died late Thursday in her sleep at her home in Bethesda, Md., according to an announcement Friday on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute. The conservative think tank, where Kirkpatrick worked for several decades after she left office, called her "a great patriot and champion of freedom."

The Associated Press quoted Mrs. Kirkpatrick's assistant there as saying she had been suffering from heart disease though no cause of death was announced.

TRAILBLAZER WITH FIRE

At the U.S. mission at the United Nations in New York, Ambassador John Bolton requested a moment of silence in her memory. "It really is very sad for America," he said. "She will be greatly missed."

At the White House, President Bush said Mrs. Kirkpatrick "influenced the thinking of generations of Americans on the importance of American leadership in advancing the cause of freedom and democracy around the globe."

And on Capitol Hill, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., called her "a patriot and a class act . . . . who almost single-handedly broke the glass ceiling for women in foreign policy." Lantos added that Kirkpatrick's "key role in beating back the 'Zionism is racism' resolution in the General Assembly saved the United Nations from itself and will be long remembered."

After Mrs. Kirkpatrick gained entry into the male purview of foreign policy, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice followed her, serving in high-profile national security positions for the Clinton and now the Bush administration. Secretary of State Rice on Friday called her a role model, "an academic who brought great intellectual power to her work."

SWAYED BY REAGAN

Mrs. Kirkpatrick came to the attention of Ronald Reagan after writing an article for the neoconservative journal Commentary in 1979.

Called "Dictatorships and Double Standards," the piece argued that utopian thinking (under the Carter administration) had moved U.S. foreign policy to destabilize friendly, anti-Communist regimes like Anastasio Somoza's in Nicaragua and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's of Iran -- only to find them replaced by unfriendly totalitarian ones.

"Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies," she wrote.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick, a lifelong Democrat was hesitant to take a job in a Republican administration, but was swayed by Reagan's commitment, and his remark, "I was a Democrat once, you know."

In February 1981, she went to New York as Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, an institution she had little use for and compared to "death and taxes." Eager to restore U.S. prowess in the wake of defeat in Vietnam and the capture of American diplomats as hostages in Iran, she vowed to do battle against Marxists, Communists and anyone else who mistook U.S. policy mistakes for weakness.

"We were concerned about the weakening of Western will," she later told an interviewer. "We advocated rebuilding Western strength, and we did that with Ronald Reagan, if I may say so."

Perhaps her most dramatic moment at the United Nations came in 1983, when she presented a film of the Soviet Union downing of a South Korean passenger plane, KAL 007, that had strayed into Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers, including a U.S. congressman, and crew aboard were killed.

CONSERVATIVE ICON

An icon to many conservatives, Mrs. Kirkpatrick was for most of her life a Democrat. Her husband, Evron, head of the American Political Science Association, was an adviser to liberal Minnesota Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey. But she said later that they were "chronically dismayed" by the party's drift toward the left after 1972.

After she resigned the U.N. post and left government in 1985, Mrs. Kirkpatrick wrote widely and became an unexpected draw on the lecture circuit, earning enough to buy a house in France, where she enjoyed cooking, according to defense official and neoconservative Richard Perle.

Jeane Duane Jordan was born in Duncan, Okla., an oil wildcatter's town about 160 miles from Dallas.

She attended Stephens College in Missouri, then transferred to Barnard College in New York. Later she got a master's degree and Ph.D. from Columbia, where her dissertation was on the rise of fascism in Britain. She is survived by two sons. A third, Douglas, died earlier this year, according to The Associated Press. Her husband of 40 years, known as "Kirk," died in 1995. *